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Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games

The legendary game designer presents an alternate way to develop games, and the awesome product of this way of thinking.

Everyone talked about it at the 2005 DICE Summit. Microsoft made it the focus of its keynote address. For many it's a cold hard fact: the price of developing a game for the next-generation of systems is going to skyrocket. It's going to take warehouses full of artists and level designers to create all the content for every title. For many, this proposition is terrifying.

Is there another way?

Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, says YES. And more than that, he believes he's found a way to make gaming a much more personal experience for everyone it touches. And it won't take hordes of content developers: it'll just take a little savvy and use of what's called "procedural" content development.

Will Wight packed an auditorium and didn't disappoint his audience.

Wright introduced his ideas to a jam-packed auditorium at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco this past week. Ordinarily, Wright's talks at events like these are high-level, esoteric discussions of game design principles -- stuff that's hard to write about, especially since he tends to whip through high-level concepts as fast as he can punch the 'next slide' button in PowerPoint. (One year, having no easy way to distill his thoughts, I wrote a parody instead.)

However, THIS year was different: Wright actually demonstrated his game design principles in action, treating listeners with an absolutely incredible product in development code-named Spore. This isn't so much a game preview as it is a look at new thoughts on game design in full effect. Read on to see what Wright's skunk-works have cooked up!

Another Vision for Content Creation

Wright opened his presentation by explaining how he's seeing firsthand how budgets are going up. For Sims 2, the characters had over 22,000 separate animations. All of those were done by hand by an army of animators. Modern games demand more and more content.

At the same time, what he calls the "value to gamers" levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn't twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience. By way of example, he put up a slide showing his Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas character -- who wore a fedora and red-heart boxer shorts. His character was ridiculous-looking, but it made the experience custom for him. Players get a huge value out of content they make for themselves.

"Owning" the content in this way means that all the stories that the gamer creates are much more meaningful.

Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user's contribution.

For inspiration, Wright looked to the "demo scene," a group of (mostly European) coders who specialized in doing a whole lot with a little bit of code. Their procedural programming methods were able to, for example, fit an entire 3D game in 64K, using mathematics to generate textures and music, etc. "I just found this incredibly exciting," Wright confesses, describing the kinds of work that he saw come out of the demo scene.

So here's what he did: he recruited an elite strike team of coders (who, if you were to believe his slideshow, dressed like ninjas) and put them in a "hidden facility" to experiment with new ways of giving the user powerful tools and generating tons of dynamic content without armies of content creators. Best of all, he fired up a demo and showed his audience the results...